Three Hours? Why?
At GDC I did an interview for Unwinnable.com. Unwinnable is a great site, by the way! You should like them and read them.
Anyway, I shared the interview on Twitter and my esteemed thought colleague Hamish Todd asked me if I really only ever play beat 'em ups for 3 hours before never touching them again. Then he said that he'd love to know why that is. It's a good question and I'm going to answer it!
ABDN’s God Of War 2 Review
This incredible GEM just happened to me: please see Action Button Dot Net's God Of War 2 review. The review ends with this:
"It is not entirely right of me to fault Sony Computer Entertainment Santa Monica for making this game. Surely they knew that all of the above was true, and that all of the above would make a successful game. Shame on them for indulging us, but shame on us for wanting it. Shame on us for coming to expect this sort of skullfucking as 'fun'. This isn’t fun. It’s a nervous tick. It’s a bad habit. It’s obsessive compulsive behavior. It’s going through an entire box of q-tips in a day, because rubbing the inside of your ear feels so good the first time that you just can’t stop, and you eventually start to tell yourself that those little clumps of blood on the cotton are just really dark, moist bits of earwax that you’re better off without."
Action Button Dot Net
Action Button Dot Net is a website that has been recently put in my lap by one of its writers. It is an absolute GOLDMINE of sharp and painful truth (monofilament blade sharp). Anything that swims through their highly critical frustum is most likely to get exactly what it deserves, whether you think it should or not, and having absorbed a key collection of the site's writings over the course of the last week I can tell you I feel like I've been repeatedly scraped over a whetstone.